Citizen social credit

So far, we’ve taken the macro view on social credit, and examined the SCS on a national scale, primarily as it relates to businesses and professionals. Now, we’ll zoom in to the city level, and take a look at how the system treats individuals in the social context.

City governments are the key players for individual social credit. A person’s city and province of residence are responsible for collecting and managing most of the information about them. City data collection, blacklisting, and punishment and reward mechanisms happen just like they do at the national level, but on a smaller scale.

Within cities, data collection is decentralized. Each city bureau is responsible for gathering and logging data that relates to its administrative area, then submitting that info to the city’s SCS database.

For example, if you get caught drunk driving, the city police would keep their own record of the traffic violation as usual, and also add that violation to the city credit database. If you’re caught teaching under false credentials at the local school, the municipal bureau of education would submit that information to your city credit record. If you don’t pay your property management fees, the city housing authority will submit that to your credit report.

Good deeds get reported too: if you volunteer for community service, the related department will submit that info. If you donate blood or bone marrow, the local health planning commission will log your donation.

That data then gets passed up the chain through the National Credit Information Sharing Platform to the provincial and national databases.

The source documents we’ve seen show that the data collected on citizens at the local level is fairly standardized from city to city. That’s because most cities in China have the same set of bureaus and agencies. Those agencies already have a standard set of records they collect. These basic data sets get passed up to the national database from every location.

But while the data sets are similar from city to city, what cities have chosen to do with SCS data at the local level varies dramatically from place to place.

Scoring systems

Some cities are independently creating citizen scoring systems based on the data. These city-level scoring systems are what often get cited in media reports on the SCS, and are sometimes confused for national scores.

The scoring pilots are completely different from city to city. Some cities have decided on a 0-200 scoring scale, some on a 0-1000 scale, and this discrepancy is evidence that the central government didn’t dictate how citizens should be scored, but left it up to the municipalities to come up with their own programs.

It’s unclear whether or not every city will eventually have a citizen scoring system, but things look to be moving in that direction. At the end of 2018, for example, Beijing released a policy on improving the city’s market environment, which included a clause on the creation of the city’s “citizen integrity” system: 10

By the end of 2020, the Beijing “individual credit” project covering all permanent residents will be built, and [the use of] credit information will be promoted in the fields of market entry, public services, travel, entrepreneurship and job hunting. …We will improve the credit blacklist system, regularly publicize the records of corporate and personal trustworthiness, and identify patterns of dishonesty and punishment so that “if one is dishonest one area, they will be limited everywhere and will find it difficult to move”, thus ensuring that those who violate the law and fall behind on debts will pay a heavy price.

This is representative of the type of policy language we’re seeing emerging from city governments across China, so we do expect that most cities will eventually develop some kind of scoring system.

It’s also unclear whether or not the central government will wait to see which scoring system is most successful, and then swoop in and order all cities to adopt it. Time will tell. But for the moment, these scoring systems are just pilot initiatives laid over the top of the SCS data, and local scores don’t have any impact on your national credit file. It’s actually the other way around: your national credit file will impact your city credit score, if you live in a city with a scoring system.

Still, because the underlying data sets are the same, examining how these scoring systems work gives us a fascinating look into what kind of behavioral data local governments are gathering on citizens, companies, and governments.

The below example of a city scoring system comes from a draft policy released in August 2018 by the government of Fuzhou (抚州), home of Yuming Points (scale ranges from 0-1000). It outlines which behaviors will result in a point deduction, which behaviors will result in an increase, and which departments are responsible for logging and submitting that data. Though this policy hasn’t yet been ratified, it gives us one of our deepest insights into the inner workings of the SCS at the city level.

Again, remember that the behavioral records that are being gathered on citizens will be passed into the central database, but the scores the city assigns are specific to that place only. Apologies for the crazy length of these tables, but we think they’re worth posting in their entirety.

Cheating on driver’s license exams or sending others to take an exam in your place

50

Buying or selling drivers license points

30: Buying drivers license points

Blacklisting: Selling drivers license points

Being in arrears on payment of goods

50

Serious criminal activity relating to public welfare (economic, food and drug, public safety)

50

Bureau of Civil Affairs
民政局

Changing the stated use of charitable donations without notifying givers

30

Providing fraudulent information to receive subsidies in elderly care or public aid

50

Justice Bureau
司法局

Illegal behaviors by law practitioners

30

Rule breaking during judicial examinations

50

Non-compliance with community correction

30

Bureau of Finance
财政局

Failure to declare and pay relevant local taxes and fees, withholding of tax arrears such as non-deductible personal income tax, etc.

30: Will be based on public announcements made by the Tax Bureau, those in serious arrears will be blacklisted.

Tax inspection infractions

50

Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security
人社局

Illegal use of child labour, social security and medical insurance benefit fraud, and refusal to correct dishonest acts as ordered

30

Unreasonably withholding or owing wages to more than 10 people, failure to pay wages in amounts over RMB 500,000, and causing group petitions, strikes and other public incidents

50

Rule breaking that results in inclusion in the Civil Servant Exam [Violators] Database or the Technical Expert Exam [Violators] Database

50

Absconding while owing wages

100

Housing Authority
房管局

Bad behavior, administrative punishments

30

Being in arrears on property management fees

15: Each payment past due by over 5 months. Max of 30 points

Being in arrears on rental payments for low-income housing and public housing

15: Each payment past due by over 5 months. Max of 30 points

Bureau of Transportation
交通局

Passenger and freight vehicles loaded over the legal limit

30

Taxi drivers who have been flagged by the Bureau of Transportation

30

Forestry Bureau
林业局

Destroying trees, indiscriminate deforestation, changing the use of forest land without authorization, reclaiming forest land without authorization, causing forest fires through negligence, and use of veterinary drugs without a license

30

Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau
文广新局

Operating an entertainment business without permission, or engaging in publishing without permission

This table is fairly representative of what we’ve seen from other scoring pilots, but in some places, local governments have expanded the “no-no” list to address localized problems.

Shanghai, for example, recently launched a garbage-sorting scheme, and is penalizing non-compliant companies and individuals through the SCS.11 In Jinan, a citizen’s score can be impacted by not leashing their dog in a public place.12 In Anqing, jaywalking has the potential to affect your credit.13

Problems

Looking at these and similar tables, a few problems jump out right away:

The point system isn’t very egalitarian

There are a lot of ways for anyone to lose points, but not as many ways for anyone to gain them. That’s because most of the ways to increase points are things over which people have very little control, or else they are awards which many people aren’t in a position to receive, particularly those in low-income brackets.

Being rewarded for providing important clues in a criminal case requires that you happen to have knowledge of that crime – a matter of circumstance and luck. Technological entrepreneurship awards, innovation awards, and literary awards generally favor the highly-educated.

According to these point scales, the only ways that anyone, at any stratum of society, can raise their points at will and by choice are by:

Doing volunteer work

Donating blood or bone marrow

Giving charitable donations

Performing “good deeds”

Violations are easier to record than acts of charity

Human bureaucracies weren’t set up to record acts of kindness. While there are already well-established collection mechanisms in place for most offenses, there aren’t established collection mechanisms for “positive” behaviors. The police know you ran a red light because there are traffic cameras designed to catch those violations. But how does the government find out you gave someone back their wallet?

A December 2018 Vice News documentary on the scoring pilot in Rongcheng features a profile of a local “information collector”, a sweet retired woman whose job is to walk the city searching out good and bad deeds, which she records in a notebook and reports to the local credit bureau office. That kind of thing might work in some small towns where everyone knows each other, but it’s definitely not nationally-scalable, nor is it objective.

The concept of “good deeds” is ill-defined

What constitutes a “good deed”, and who decides? The nebulousness of this wording leaves it too open to interpretation.